FFXIV: Identity Crisis & Progress

With only 100 days left until Heavensward’s Early Access, I’d be lying if I didn’t say I’m feeling a push to get things done. With the announcement of Heavensward’s upcoming FC crafting and airship project, I’ve also tried to double down on leveling my crafting the best I can. I’m not sure if I’m going to make it in time, but I’m going to try!

Progression

A quick Triple Triad Update! I haven’t had a whole lot of time to dedicate to card playing, but I’m happy to announce that I got the Squall card, which you earn with the achievement for winning against 30 different NPC card players. FFXIVTriad.com only lists 32 NPCs to play against, and I haven’t unlocked the rank with the Ixali to play their representative, so that means I had to ram my head against the wall to get wins against all but two NPCs (darn you, Marcette!). I currently only have 34 cards in my deck, but that’s going to have to wait, because I have more than enough tugging at my gaming time to keep me busy.

Zuri at the end of World of Darkness

Our Free Company <Guard> continues to grow – I think the Heavensward announcement, coupled with the welcome back week, brought back a lot of folks. Most of these are finding us from my forum and Reddit recruitment posts. I’ve discovered these folks tend to be much closer in alignment to our FC’s vision than the few that answer to in-game /shout recruits. So, I’ve stopped advertising us in game and hope that the forums will do their thing. We’ve had a little turnover (to be expected), but are still nearing a comfortable 50 member mark, with our first anniversary just on the horizon!

I’m like a sliver of experience away on Alchemist from having all my crafting classes to at least level 30 on Zuri. This has been a long road. Oh, and fishing is now level 49 – so close!

This weekend, Syn and I finished World of Darkness for the first time, and did the weekly CT run for the Carbon-whatever item. Not that I have anything Poetic to upgrade yet!

My Identity Crisis

So, I have a problem in most MMOs: I roll way too many characters. I have a hard time settling on one race/class/look and tend to have all kinds of alts to experiment with things.

With the class system in FFXIV, the game actually discourages rolling alts, mostly because you really don’t need them. But what do I do? Roll an alt anyhow. To my credit, though, I actually have a lot less alts in FFXIV than any other game. XD

When I started playing, I was by myself, and rolled my “main” Bard, Zuri Nimat. I tend to play her when Syn is not around, and use her to scope out new content first and get comfortable with it. Bard allows me to stand back and absorb the mechanics – when I play raids, I like to know every little trick, which is not something as easily learned for me on a melee DPS.

Tai sporting partial Paladin artifact armor.

When Syn decided to join me in FFXIV (yay!), I rolled my duo alt, TsuYa Tai. I did this in order to play the story along with Syn, so we could stay in stride. I rolled him as a Dragoon, a class I struggled to play up until they gave the Dragoon some love after the Ninja was released. Since then, I’ve enjoyed playing him a lot more, and even completed his Atma and purchasing all of his ilvl 100 gear.

Part of my identity crisis comes from the fact that as our FC has expanded, the number of folks playing Bard has also increased. Bard is just that awesome that everyone seems to like to play it! In fact, I think Tai is the only high level Dragoon we have, and one of a handful of melee DPS. It’s really odd since it used to be flipped for a long time – Dragoon was a favorite DPS.

I think folks should play what they like – it’s part of what our FC stands for. And I really love Bard, so I understand the Bard luv. But I feel that I should start branching out with other classes to help round out our FC parties. I’ve been pulling Tai in more than Zuri lately, and they’ve become pretty equal in all things, including ilvl and story progression.

I’ve been trying to level Scholar on Zuri to provide some variation in healers available – we have quite a few white mages (which is always cool). I’ve even been using my tomes and lucky healer drops from ST to stow away ilvl 100 gear for the class once I unlock 50.

However, the road to leveling another class has been slow for me. Especially since I’m working on leveling Paladin on Tai, who finally reached level 47 last night. Tanking has been another slow, nervous learning process for me. Some days, I’m all gung ho about it (yay, I tanked Cutter’s Cry a few times!). Other days, I shiver at the thought of having to tank stuff to unlock the Paladin relic, or tackle something like ST.

My last few ST runs (0n both Zuri and Tai) have only seen lousy rolls on oil and sands, leaving me with no upgrades at all for days. I’m not even close to picking up my first poetic item, because splitting time between the two characters has slowed down tome acquisition – and even if I did get enough to buy something, I’m not sure which class to use it for anymore!

In the meantime, Syn’s upgraded Zeb’s items all the way and even has an ilvl 130 ring now. She wants to start relic books, and I want to do them with her, but I’m trying to save tomes for alt class armor (haven’t even started that on Tai’s Paladin yet). I’m not even sure which class is going to end up my main~!

Augh!

I feel so behind! See? Crisis! (First world problems.) 😥

I’d like to pick one thing and stick with it, but that’s not so easy. Zuri has all my crafting and gathering progress, as well as my Gold Saucer progress, and is known as my main (when people talk to me in the FC, they call me Zuri). Plus I adore the character and really enjoy playing her. So, I can’t just leave her in the dust, either.

(Oh, and that’s not including the poor Cactuar server alt I made – I’m really sorry, nice Cactuar people! Not enough hours in the day!)

This is what I get for waiting this long to make end game progress, I suppose.

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I'm a technical writer by day, gaming gal by night. I have a wide array of gaming interests, though I most often blog about MMOs, RPGs, and Nintendo fanstuffs. Like what you just read? Check out my Webcomic and Fantasy Fiction projects! https://aywren.com/fantasy-fiction-webcomics/
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23 thoughts on “FFXIV: Identity Crisis & Progress”

It’s certainly been useful for you to have so many options of classes to play when it comes to dungeon running. But I can see how difficult it is to stay viable in multiple classes once you hit the end-game content.

It’s really not that terrible, and part of it was my fault for taking so much time off in the game. Zuri has been level 50 Bard for almost a year now. I was just too shy to try things like Crystal Tower on my own. So I could have been progressing her and Tai much faster last year… and I didn’t.

So now, with the expansion coming, and since Syn is currently addicted to ST, I’m paying for not doing more before this. I’m kicking myself because I’ve discovered a lot of this stuff is really fun, especially with awesome FC members like you. Can’t wait for you to come and run Crystal Tower with us eventually. 🙂

I remember how scared you two were before going in there the first time. Told you it’s fun XD

Sorry I don’t have a lot of time to make events and run them. Busy with a lot of things currently. Still, with the great recruits we have now it’s no issue on finding people to join and have fun in dungeons or raids ;P

We were scared! I think it was the word “raid” that did it – I was imagining something out of vanilla WoW, honestly. WoD is still on iffy grounds with me – I need to practice some more to get the hang of it.

We do have plenty of folks to run it, and tend to take people along for learning and practice runs. It seems to be that thing that people like to jump into just because it’s usually quick and fun. I foresee more in the future as we continue to have people reaching level 50 and needing to gear up.

Well I play on my PC as I don’t own a PS4. However you can still get the console feel on it. After all you can connect a ps3/4 gamepad to your pc and play FFXIV using that. It’s fun, unless the controller decides to be random.

Mine is just dieing probably. But I am playing on my PC using the pad… having loads of fun with it XD That would also give you the option of keyboard and mouse if you decide pad is not for you.

The one character thing is that you can have all classes and jobs on one character. Just by changing your weapon you can go from being a weaver to summoner. That is you still need to level them separately, but it gives you a lot of freedom to choose. You also don’t need to start from scratch if you decide that you get bored with one class.

As for the wait or buy, I’d decide by judging if you will have time to play. I mean the expansion adds a lot of things, but you will still need to go through the base content for most of it. So I would say it depends on how you feel comfortable with your time and which platform you like better.

The expansion comes out late June.. 23rd I believe with early access on the 19th. So you have time before it. Try going for the trial or a free weekend, will let you have at least a bit of experience. Not to mention you can level your character till level 20 I believe so it’s a good start. 😉

PC vs PS4 isn’t a huge difference. Just as long as you have a way to communicate on PS4 (keyboard). Though, for folks in my FC who play PS4, they have to switch on a laptop when they want to use voice communication for dungeons and such. So that’s something to consider if you’re looking into joining a community.

You start out with one class. When you reach level 10 of that first class, you unlock the ability to switch to any other class in game. You just have to travel to that class’ physical guild, talk to the guild master and you swap.

Classes center around an Armoury System – each class is given a specific weapon type. When you equip the weapon type, you change to that class. You can store all your weapons/armor in a separate storage called the armoury. Then you save an armor set, which you can switch back to at any time to switch to that class. The armor set remembers your hotbars and skills, as well.

Whether to get it before or after expansion, I’ll just say there’s so much content in this game that I’m probably not going to finish everything I want to do before the expansion launches. From my understanding, the new classes won’t be unlocked until you have at least one level 30 class, and it seems that most of the new expansion content is aimed at higher level characters.

I know that the expansion will feature an all in one option, so you can purchase the game + expansion at launch. Another option, as suggested is to try out the free trial. Just keep in mind that the beginning eases you in somewhat slowly, but it really starts to pick up as you level. And level 50 is seriously just the beginning. *too much to do*

Chances are, if you’re going to hook up with the rest of the blogging crew, that’ll be on Cactuar (where I rarely play because there’s too much to do on my mains). But if you do ever stop by the Midgardsormr server, you’re always welcome with my Free Company, too! 🙂

The worst that can happen is that you get lost in the Gold Saucer and never return. 🙂

Servers are locked throughout the day in cycles, depending on the server population. So, earlier in the day, some servers will open, then they’ll close later in night to funnel new player creation to other servers. Cactuar has had a few queues lately, so it might just be closed for the afternoon.

Midgardsormr is a comfortably populated server, and I always see folks running around no matter what town I visit. We usually don’t have too many character creation restrictions, though, so you’d probably be able to hop on our server.

I’m not sure what limitations a free trial has (whisper/join FC/whathaveyou), but if you do roll on our server, please see if you can whisper me: either Zuri Nimat or TsuYa Tai, and I’ll see if I can send an invite. I’m usually online after work – will probably be a bit after 6 PM EST tonight.

Well you can link the accounts, but you need to buy separate instances for the game. So if you want PS4 and PC you need to buy two copies… also you can’t play the same account at the same time on them. So you’d either make a separate account for each version or be prepared that you will not be able to let someone play on the other platform when you play.

I know that pain… I have altitis, as I tend to call it, in most games I was able to be self sustainable thanks to them. Not to mention help people out because of that. In FFXIV I also have an alt… which is waiting his turn for now XD

Still I focus on my summoner and plan to actually try levelling my tank… not sure about he healer as Aria usually takes that role, but with her wanting to play dragoon… as it is her favorite class… I might consider doing the scholar quests… I like having summons I guess. ;P

Still if you can’t choose just set roles for them. You do not have to have all classes on both… Just maybe decide what one and the other is going to be. That is always an option, right?

Finish all crafting turn-ins, Ixali quests, and remember mini cactpot on Zuri every night. She also gets weekly hunts and weekly crafting/gathering/fishing challenges.

Continue leveling Paladin on Tai just a little every night. At first, the goal was a level a night, but the closer I get to 50, the slower it’s been coming. Doing those dungeon runs was a big boost, though.

And then I get pulled along on at least one CT run on some character. This weekend, it was all Zuri, because I was trying to learn WoD, and unlocked the CT weekly on her.

Once Paladin is leveled, I’ve got enough gear stashed from other stuff to push Tai’s ilvl up enough to do things… if I’m brave enough to try. Relic? Maybe?

Scholar on Zuri, however, is in the lower 30s, so it’s gonna be a while before I get her to 50. That’ll be my next leveling project, though! I have a lot of ilvl 100 armor waiting for her when she gets there!:)

Hey, setting goals is always good, it’s how I got myself to do some things XD
Well the Relic is more of a grind so not really much to be scared about there. ;P
As for anything you know me, Aria and all the FC members will be more than happy to join you and level. 😉 So no worries there ^^

I know the pain… I’ve been trying to gear up, and get all my crafting classes to 50 before Heavensward, plus I’m the leader of an FC on Siren server (mostly casual players but very active) which takes up an insane amount of time. There’s just not enough hours in the day!

Plus I’ve rolled up several alts, none of which are over lvl 30… I even made an alt on Migsardsomr to be able to play with friends on there but I haven’t even reached lvl 15, my FC on Siren is just taking up all my time. Ah if only there were about 10 more hours in every day….

I so want to play this, but I am afraid that it will suck me in so much that I forsake my steam library again. I’m also torn between getting it asap or waiting for Heavensward – I am pretty keen on being a dragonperson!